Displaying items by tag: Padfone

Asus as a company has an interesting past and also an interesting future. In the component industry Asus has emerged as an innovative and competitive company. You can see this in the popularity of their motherboards, GPUs and even audio products that they sell. It seems that many other companies rush to catch up with them as they branch out into more and more vertical markets. Asus has even pushed into the storage market with their own line up of business NAS products and an enthusiast grade PCIe SSD. Asus has also had their hands on products that they design (and build) for other companies. They recently received a huge push when Google decided to use their design for the popular Nexus 7 tablet.

For those of you that are pinning for the Asus Padfone (we know we are) there is some good news (well sort of). Since it was first shown off at CES 2010 (in render form) there has been talk about battery life. Now that we have seen what devices like the Transformer and Transformer prime can do there has been even more speculation on the topic. Well is seems that Asus decided to let Engadget in on some battery performance numbers.

Four days ago we talked about Asus and their awesome ability to design hardware that people really do want, but the issues they seem to have with getting those products to market (and maintaining supply). We specifically called out the Padfone that was shown off as a concept in 2009, actually domed in 2010, and officially launched mid-2011. This product that many are asking for has yet to see a paying customer’s hands and now we are hearing that there are supply issues with the Qualcomm SoC that is under the hood.

Asus has recently released their quarterly results for the other side of Asus. This is the part of the company that makes and sells notebooks, netbooks, the EEE Pad, PC and Slate. It is also a part of the company that we expect to turn into its own fully fledged market with the potential for direct sales in the future. The numbers look pretty impressive so far with gains across the board.

The Mobile World Congress kicked off today in Barcelona Spain. This is one of the yearly events that help to shape the mobile technology world. We have already seen some information slip even before the conference kicked off as companies like HTC tried to get the jump on the competition and rumors popped up about Asus’ next generation Transformer.

Asus had some great news during the AsiaD conference today. Not only did they finally show off the next generation Transformer (now called the Transformer Prime) but they also announced Ultrabooks, the Padfone and gave us a rough idea of when we can expect to see Ice Cream Sandwich for their line of Android Tablets. Now that we have set the table let’s dive in and see how each one of these tastes.

To kick things off Jonney Shih brought out the new Transformer Prime. This is the one that everyone has been talking about since rumors first popped up about a new Quad Core tablet in early September. Then just yesterday Asus dropped a nice teaser video on the internet that again ran around like mad. Now we are finally getting to see this new device. Although not a complete launch (that is on the 9th of November) Jonney showed use a 10 inch tablet with an 8.3mm thick slate. Under the hood is a Quad Core Tegra 3 SoC which should be more than capable of handling just about anything you throw at it. Although the amount of memory has not been fully disclosed we are betting on 2GB as that is in keeping with the typical 512MB per core that nVidia likes to have. Other items of interest on the Prime are a mini-HDMI, an SD Card Slot… pretty much the same thing you find on the current Transformer.

Next up is something that we have been wondering about since we saw a video explaining Asus’ direction for the coming years. This is the Padfone, at the time it show it was all concept art and not much else. However now we find out that it is going to launch in Q1 2012 and should ship with Android 4.0. For those of you that are no familiar with this it is basically a “super phone” with a 10.1-inch tablet that it can dock into. Think of the Atrix with quite a bit more style and class.

Last on the list of cool things coming from Asus was an announcement of Ultrathin Netbooks that will look something like the Zenbook, only smaller. According to Shih the netbook is not dead but does need to evolve to survive. We will try to get some more information about these items (especially the Transformer Prime and Padfone) in the next few weeks and get this out to you as soon as we get it.

Source and Image Credit Engadget

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